Course Details

The Master in Design for Emergent Futures is for students who want to expand their focus interests and acquire the skills to turn protests into prototypes, ideas into actions, and who are engaged in the mission of transforming the current status of affairs in society. The programme aims to provide strategic vision and tools for designers, sociologists, economists and computer scientists, to become agents of change in multiple professional environments and focuses in the design of interventions in the form of products, platforms and deployments that aim to produce new emergent futures, by previously analysing the current challenges in society and industry. The Master in Design for Emergent Futures is organised by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and ELISAVA Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, in collaboration with the Fab Academy.

Competition Details

The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia announces every year a Scholarship Competition giving our master’s applicants the chance to win partial scholarships covering 50%, 30%, 20% of the tuition fee of each IAAC’s academic programme.

Project Brief

Cultivating Regenerative Futures: In the midst of a global pandemic, designers are called to take a step forward and intervene in the systems they operate both at the micro and macro scales. MDEF aims to align designers with their purpose, but also with new principles of regeneration of the natural systems and human relations that make possible the inhabitation of life on planet earth.

We are calling for ideas that could be connected with Fab Lab Barcelona’s research areas (Civic Ecology, Distributed Design, Emergent Futures, Future Learning, Materials and Textiles, Productive Cities, and Sense Making) and projects, that contain principles of regeneration at multiple scales, and that contribute with existing work in the field of distributed design and manufacturing, bioregional development, and futures studies.

Please note – winners will be dedicating time during the program to work with IAAC and Elisava research teams as assistants in specific projects.

In order to participate, candidates interested in the MDEF Scholarship Competition must:

  • Hold a first-level academic diploma or Bachelor degree, or about to graduate within the academic year 2021/22;
  • Have a full proficient level in English;
  • Complete the IAAC scholarship application form below in full*.
  • Submit your project in pdf format, A3 format, 3 pages max (max 8MB) by sending an email to the Applications Department ([email protected]);

*If you have already applied to an IAAC Master program, please send an email to the Applications Department ([email protected]) to communicate that you are participating in the scholarship competition as well. In this email, please attach your project proposal (as indicated on the scholarship page ”Project Brief”)

Competition Deadline

Start date: 25th January 2022 – 00:00 (CET)
End date: 25th February 2022 – 23:59 (CET)
Winners announced: 11th March 2022 – 23:59 (CET)

The Selection Committee

The Jury will be integrated by master programme Directors, faculty and special guests and professionals coming from the different topics to be addressed by the 6 competitions.  

Winners Announcement

The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia will release the name of the winners on its official website in March 2022.

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